Avengers: End Game — Bernie Sanders calls on Disney to use box office profits to pay workers ‘middle class wage’

The movie smashed box office records since it was first released last week

(REUTERS)

Bernie Sanders has an idea of how Disney can write a “truly heroic” story following the box-office record shattering weekend from Avengers: End Game this past week: Spread the profits around.

Mr Sanders, in a tweet, took the entertainment behemoth to task, criticising the salary of the company’s CEO, Bob Iger, and urging better pay for the rest of the employees there.

Mr Iger makes a reported $65.6m a year from his post as the head honcho at Disney — a salary that is 1,400 times as much as the income of an average worker there.

“What would be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from ‘Avengers’ to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, instead of paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6mn — over 1,400 times as much as the average worker at Disney makes,” Mr Sanders wrote on Twitter.

Avengers: End Game shattered box office records by taking in $356m in the US over the weekend, and more than $1.22bn internationally in its first week in theatres.

Mr Sanders is no stranger to criticising the wealthy in America, though it is unclear if he managed to catch a screening of the film once it hit theatres this weekend.

The first week haul of the shows marks the first time that a movie release has topped $1bn in the first weekend of release.

An heir to the Disney fortune, Abigail Disney, recently calculated that Mr Iger could have handed out a 10 per cent raise to all of the employees at Disneyland and still have walked away with $10m total in compensation last year.